Yeah it wouldn’t be called the Olympics because that would be (for lack of a desire to be more articulate) stupid.
Somewhere between competition and pageant, though neither of those are at all appropriate either. I’m sure there is some old retired half-dead word out there that would serve admirably in this role. That’s the thing about words, a lot of times the older and deader the words are, the more useful they become.
What these not-Olympics would be is a contemporaneous gathering of the greatest musicians in the world from each country. It would happen concurrently and uh co-spatially with each of the regular olympics but would be separate from the IOC.
The basic thought behind this came while thinking about the athletic Olympics and the idea that this gigantic world interaction really doesn’t really provide any real permanent benefit. All we get out of it, at least from the content of the actual Olympic events, is who is better than who at what. I think that that is a actually a worthwhile thing and not as dumb as it sounds. But I also can see a situation in which each country, each culture, puts forth its most striking examples of its own music, its own rhythmic interpretation of life, where, when it was over, we would not only have seen who was the best but we could take the best home with us; it could enlarge the world and open it in a way that the long jump never could.
I think it should be a competition of sorts because nationalism and pride and a desire to be the very best are (at least in this format) good and useful and even great things. I’m not sure how the categories would be set-up or how each country would decide which musicians would be sent but something could certainly be worked out.
